Earthy Anecdotes: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Hellish Dinner Scene

One of the most influential horror movies of all-time, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre remains more famous for its small budget than its hellish production in the summer of 1973. While the weather that year was relatively mild by the standards of rural Texas, temperatures still hovered in the region of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and concern over the cost of equipment rentals meant that shooting lasted for up to 16 hours each day, seven days a week.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the second feature by the 30-year-old director Tobe Hooper, who reunited with the 27-year-old screenwriter Kim Henkel following their work on the 1969 experimental hippie daydream Eggshells. Years after the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hooper and Henkel would elaborate on their influences to the point of distorting timelines and mythologising some of the contemporary resonance of their film.

The billboard signs at the time of release read, ‘What happened is true. Now the motion picture that’s just as real.’ Narrated by John Larroquette, the opening crawl states in yellowing text:

‘The film which you are about to see is an account of the tragedy which befell a group of five youths, in particular Sally Hardesty and her invalid brother, Franklin. It is all the more tragic in that they were young. But, had they lived very, very long lives, they could not have expected nor would they have wished to see as much of the mad and macabre as they were to see that day. For them an idyllic summer afternoon drive became a nightmare. The events of that day were to lead to the discovery of one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.’

But The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was based on no single case and drew from the life of no one serial killer. Instead Hooper argued that his intentionally misleading framing device echoed and called out the lies of the American government, over everything from Vietnam and Watergate to the first oil crisis. Henkel meanwhile cited the influence of Elmer Wayne Henley and what would become known as the Houston Mass Murders, where Henley and his fellow teenage accomplice David Owen Brooks lured dozens of boys and young men to the house of the serial killer Dean Corll, who tortured, raped, and murdered them before burying their bodies. Henkel said:

‘I saw some news report where Elmer Wayne was identifying bodies and their locations, and he was this skinny little ol’ seventeen year old, and he kind of puffed out his chest and said, “I did these crimes, and I’m gonna stand up and take it like a man”. Well, that struck me as interesting, that he had this conventional morality at that point. He wanted it known that, now that he was caught, he would do the right thing. So this kind of moral schizophrenia is something I tried to build into the characters.’

In fact production on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre lasted for one month from 15 July to 14 August 1973, while the Houston Mass Murders were not revealed until Henley shot Corll dead and confessed to his crimes just days before the film completed shooting. The oil embargo on nations including the United States was not proclaimed by Saudi Arabia until October of 1973, while the Watergate investigation had burst into life on 16 July, when the White House assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed on live television the existence of listening devices in the Oval Office of President Nixon.

Beyond debate are the themes and psychoses made manifest especially in the early scenes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: images of skinned corpses decomposing in the blazing sun; incessant radio coverage of death and violence, from collapsed buildings and cholera epidemics to sordid tales of suicide and grave robbery; news of oil troubles, from a fire at a local Texaco facility to South American territorial disputes; and the stench from a slaughterhouse lined up with rows of muttering cattle.

When a passing tanker spews its gas and kicks up dirt by the side of the road, Franklin is tossed down the side of a small embankment and tumbles out of his wheelchair. When he regales the practices of the slaughterhouses where his grandfather once worked, Pam cries ‘Franklin, I like meat, please change the subject!’ By the time filming on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was complete, the director Tobe Hooper would turn to vegetarianism.

Beyond the ceaseless chatter of the radio and kindred spirits in the form of contemporary exploitation movies, the influences on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre include Ed Gein, the murderer and body snatcher who fashioned keepsakes out of skin and bone and became an indelible part of popular culture as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. The action of the film also drew from the idle fancies of its creators. Hooper said that the idea for a chainsaw as the chief murder weapon came during a Christmas shopping trip to Montgomery Ward, as he eyed the hardware section for means of escape from the crowded shoppers.

According to Gunnar Hansen, the Icelandic-born actor and author who accepted the role of Leatherface, on the day that Elmer Wayne Henley confessed to his gruesome crimes, Leatherface was busy hanging Pam on a meat hook in accordance with the packed shooting schedule. It is their quest for gas which compels the young group to cross paths with Leatherface and his clan of cannibals.

Earlier at the gas station, with its signs for Gulf Oil, Coca-Cola, and barbecue next to the notice ‘We Slaughter’, the buck-toothed proprietor tells the group that he has no gas, saying ‘transport won’t be here until late this afternoon, maybe not even until tomorrow morning’. When they arrive at the Hardesty homestead, Kirk and Pam head off in search of a nearby swimming hole, skipping through the grass and warding off the bugs before finding the hole dried up and desolate. They spot a house in the distance, and figure that they might be able to trade for gas, perhaps leaving a guitar and returning sometime later with more money.

The bulk of the film then occurs at the home of Leatherface and gang, an early twentieth-century farmhouse located on Quick Hill Road near the city of Round Rock in Texas. In 1998, the house was purchased and moved to Kingsland, where it was restored and now stands as a café, but in 1973 the dilapidated home provided little respite with no air conditioning and poor ventilation.

At the height of summer, the art director Robert A. Burns drove around Texas collecting cattle remains and other decaying animal parts, which along with fetid cheese and strips of latex served to decorate the set. The windows were hung with thick black drapes to mimic the night, with the low-speed Ektachrome film stock demanding intense lighting. Tobe Hooper said that the production became like a sort of war dance, with ‘the heat, the smoke, and bones cooking under the hot lights’ making the atmosphere on set thoroughly miserable.

Without the money for second costumes, Gunnar Hansen was forced to wear his faux-skin mask for up to 16 hours a day, while Marilyn Burns was so thoroughly caked with stage blood that her outfit became ‘virtually solid’. Hansen and William Vail had close run-ins with the chainsaw, and Vail as Kirk suffered a black eye after Hansen struck him in the face with a prop sledgehammer. Tobe Hooper also separated Marilyn Burns and Paul A. Partain from the rest of the cast, encouraging Partain as Franklin to act aloof, eat alone, and keep his clothes nice and sweaty.

After Leatherface has dispatched with Kirk, Pam, Jerry, and Franklin, the plucky Sally Hardesty manages to escape from the house, only to be returned bound and gagged by the brotherly proprietor of the gas station. The dinner sequence which functions like a black hole towards the climax of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre took 27 consecutive hours to shoot, in a room hung with bones and rotten animal carcasses while formaldehyde was used to embalm the sausage meat strewn about the dining table.

John Dugan was only 20 years old when he took the role of Grandpa Sawyer, and grew so vexed with the five hours of makeup required for the part that he swiftly refused another application. Jim Siedow was also scheduled to depart for a play, so it was decided that the dinner sequence would have to be filmed all in one sitting. As the formaldehyde evaporated and the stench from the unwashed costume of Leatherface filled the room, the makeup artist Dottie Pearl looked around and thought, ‘We are truly living this thing. We aren’t making it any more. We’re living it’.

Long stretches of dialogue and Hooper’s desire for excessive coverage meant that filming lasted throughout the night. Makeup had to be reapplied, lights moved, and some of the decomposing food replaced on the dining room table. As Leatherface, now donning matronly garb, and his gathered family members torment the bound Sally Hardesty, the scene called for Grandpa Sawyer to be wheeled downstairs where he would suck the blood from Sally’s finger. But the prop knife wielded by Hansen, covered with adhesive tape and rigged with a tube which was meant to spurt fake blood, repeatedly failed to perform, prompting Hansen to take more desperate measures.

Years after the fact, Hansen would admit that after several botched takes, he grew exasperated and removed the adhesive tape from the prop knife, actually slicing Marilyn Burns’s finger. After a quick squeeze to get more blood, he placed the finger into Dugan’s mouth, who as Grandpa Sawyer was vivified by the act, flicking his arms and legs like a baby suckling at the teat of his mother.

Burns received a bandage, only finding out that Hansen had cut her deliberately years later during a question and answer session at a screening of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. She described her shock and anger, admitting that her initial thought upon hearing the revelation had been ‘They couldn’t be that cruel’. Burns eventually forgave her fellow actor, before she and Hansen died little over a year apart in August 2014 and November 2015. Dugan took the news quite differently, saying:

‘I didn’t find out until years later I was actually sucking on her blood, which is kind of erotic really. I do recall some sexual stirrings during that scene. Although it was playacting, it was still … to have this woman under our control and her screaming, she’s beautiful and we’re doing weird shit to her. There’s some primal thing that comes alive. I hate to admit that.’

Burns also described the leering and the multiple takes of the long dinner sequence, comparing the action to a snuff movie. Edwin Neal, who played the part of the hitchhiker, said that ‘Filming that scene was the worst time of my life, and I had been in Vietnam’. On the other hand the production manager Ronald Bozman, who later won an Academy Award as a producer on the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, called the scene ‘a living nightmare’ but thought the marathon session probably paid off in the end, adding ‘It might have had its own crazy dynamic and made it better’.

By the time of its release one year later in October 1974, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre had far exceeded its original $60,000 budget, with costs escalating towards $300,000 in the editing phase. Despite the gory subject matter and the cuts and scrapes, the black eyes and other bruises, the near misses and the vomit-inducing stench which characterised life on set, Hooper had still hoped to secure a PG rating for his movie, which limits the onscreen blood and guts and carries out many of its killings by way of suggestion, with only one character in the film actually dying by chainsaw.

Aided by Warren Skaaren of the Texas Film Commission, the film had been picked up by the Bryanston Distributing Company, which Bozman later decried as ‘a deal with the devil’ while accepting ‘we got what we deserved’. Boosted by clever advertising, including an iconic film poster and the marketing of the film as a true story, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre instead obtained a restricted R rating and became a word-of-mouth smash.

In its first eight years, the movie is estimated to have taken in the region of $50 million as it was reissued annually to first-run theatres and midnight movie houses, sometimes playing in a double bill with Eraserhead. In 1975, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre even received a showing at Cannes. The cast and crew would see little of the proceeds as Bryanston Distributing Company raced towards bankruptcy, but in the meantime they were still reeling from the torrid time they had endured while shooting the picture, with Tobe Hooper admitting that ‘Everyone hated me by the end of production. It just took years for them to kind of cool off’.